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OASIS |
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| Functionality The Future Technical Details Office of the Registrar CNIT OASIS Login |
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What is OASIS? OASIS = Online Academic Support and Information System OASIS is Heidelberg's secure, homegrown system for providing timely, personalized academic information to students, faculty, and administrative staff via the web. OASIS works in conjunction with Heidelberg's administrative database system to provide immediate access to campus constituents via an intuitive interface. Where is OASIS? OASIS is accessible from any computer connected to the Internet. Heidelberg students, faculty, and staff with OASIS accounts can visit http://oasis.heidelberg.edu to access the system. |
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| Brief History OASIS started with the idea that Heidelberg students and faculty should have real-time access to academic information in a familiar environment (the web). Developed in a symbiosis between our Registrar, best suited to understanding our unique requirements for presenting academic information, and our information technology staff, best suited to developing a technical solution within our existing framework, the initial version of OASIS "went live" in November of 2000. The system maintains the Heidelberg "look-and-feel" and provides the right kind of information, right away. Commercial web-based solutions do exist, but out of the necessity of the marketplace, such products try too hard to be all things to all institutions. Sometimes, institutional identity and important flexibility suffer in such systems. By developing our own tools customized to our own requirements, we believe we can best meet the unique needs of our academic population. Our use of freely available tools for web system development allows OASIS to grow and evolve rapidly, meeting new needs as quickly as they are identified and incorporating the changes our users desire. Functionality OASIS is a living, breathing entity. New functions continue to be added rapidly as new challenges and requirements are identified. Some of the features OASIS currently provides include
We believe OASIS is in its infancy, and we continue to plan new, exciting, and useful features for the system. For us, the major attraction of the homegrown approach is its ability to adapt rapidly to new and changing requirements. For additional information about OASIS, contact the Office of the Registrar (registrar@heidelberg.edu), or send email to oasis@heidelberg.edu. Technical Details OASIS makes use of several open source/BSD-style license development tools, which facilitates rapid system extension and prototyping. The majority of the source code is written in XHTML, PHP (www.php.net), and ECMAScript (www.ecma.ch). Newer portions of the OASIS system utilize the Smarty template engine (smarty.php.net) for easier development and enhanced performance. These newer sections also make use of the overLIB JavaScript library (www.bosrup.com/web/overlib) to facilitate the creation of popup information boxes and help text. Homegrown query libraries provide the backend connection to an ORACLE® database running the SCT® Banner2000™ integrated database system. Object-oriented hooks to the database are provided with slight local extensions to the PHPLIB library (phplib.sourceforge.net), and database queries are executed using SQL. ORACLE® and Banner2000™ provide the real-time data repository. The caliber and design of these two commercial products, combined with the openness and ease-of-use of the aforementioned languages and tools, make it simple to rapidly develop new features and functionality. The system uses secure sockets layer (SSL) transport to provide secure, encrypted transmission of all information to the web client. The open source Apache web server (www.apache.org) is compiled with the OpenSSL (www.openssl.org) and modSSL (www.modssl.org) libraries. The commercial but freely-available Zend Optimizer™ (www.zend.com) enhances the performance of the PHP module, which is also compiled into the web server. As of February, 2003, OASIS consists of roughly 38,500 lines of source code. |
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A note on trademarks: |
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this document, and Heidelberg College was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. However, Heidelberg College cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. ORACLE® and all Oracle-based trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation, Inc., in the United States and other countries. Banner and SCT are registered trademarks, and Banner2000 is a trademark, of Systems & Computer Technology Corporation. The Zend Optimizer is a trademark of Zend Technologies Ltd. |
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